Hurricane Katrina Recovery Case Study

In many ways, the recovery efforts from Hurricane Katrina were just as devastating as the storm itself. The United States currently uses a three-Tiered system consisting of State, Local, and National entities responsible for responding to natural disasters. Accordingly, these regional Commands have a responsibility to ensure that they are ready to respond to events of this magnitude. In the case of Hurricane Katrina, there can be faults found at every level. Perhaps the most telling fault was the failure to have an adequate plan that would allow for an appropriate response. This further leads to their inability to coordinate efforts for recovery. Which would result in a lack of integration of necessary resources. The regional Commands failure to plan, coordinate, and integrate resources resulted in a dreadful response in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
Plan
After September 11, 2001, the United …show more content…
This is why FEMA relies on the Incident Command System. Accordingly, the Incident Commander is responsible for coordinating with all necessary resources and is assigned a full staff (FEMA, 2017). Accordingly, FEMA provides all Incident Commanders with specialized training to respond to a wide range of events. In the case of Hurricane Katrina, however that never truly materialized. The National Guard remained under the governor and NORTHCOM remained under the control of the President. What transpired was that the regional DHS office was actually unable to perform that role despite absorbing FEMA in 2003 (Transforming National Preparedness, n.d.). That is not the sole reason for the failure to integrate resources, but having that singular point of contact would have alleviated some of those issues. Potentially two of the biggest issues were the lack of personnel and communication capabilities, both of which would likely have resolved